Industrial plants are often controlled and maintained by industrial process control and automation systems. A control and automation system contains various components, such as servers, clients, controllers, gateways, sensors, transmitters and field devices, which are used to control and automate all or substantially all of an industrial plant. Communication and transmission of critical process data among these components plays a major role in automation and maintenance of plant operations.
In a distributed control and automation system, the system often communicates with field devices through a gateway, which is responsible for transferring data to and from the field devices. Because a gateway stores information about these field devices, the number of field devices with which a gateway may communicate is limited by the amount of memory available in the gateway.